Steam gaming service: Where is it?

Valve’s Steam gaming service is slated to launch Wednesday, though so far the digital distribution service has yet to go live on Steam’s website. We earlier posted a review of Portal, one of the announced launch titles of the service. We anticipated having the review up just in time for Steam’s launch. As you can tell, things haven’t worked out that way. We have no word yet from Valve as to when the service will launch: it could be in five minutes, it could be in five hours.

Some people on our forums have asked how we can post a review of a game that has not officially been released. Game journalists traditionally get copies of games before they are released in order to get reviews of said games up on the day of their release. In a similar tradition, press members were given access to Steam’s private beta earlier this month and have been able to test Portal as it was updated, tweaked, and eventually made ready for launch. After playing with the game over the last week and watching bugs disappear, the game became launch ready and we felt confident that we could write an accurate review of the title.

When Steam does launch, we plan to continue our coverage by discussing the lineup of available games on the service and what Mac gamers can look forward to in the future. Steam’s launch is arguably the biggest story of the year so far for Mac gaming, so you’ll have to forgive us our excitement.